It is common practice, in many situations, to copy data or information from one place and paste it to another place. This is typically done in a computer related environment where data is copied and pasted between different applications, documents, etc.
In the travel industry, a significant number of different applications exist in many different contexts. In the case of bookings for example, there may be front office applications, middle office applications, applications for invoicing and payment or any other appropriate type of application. Whatever the circumstance applications are becoming more and more integrated and the need to transfer data from one application to another continues to grow.
An internal system may offer seamless integrations of numerous standalone applications in all relevant products of that system. However, most systems need to communicate with external applications and there is often a need to exchange data from an external application to an internal one or vice versa.
It is not always possible for a complete integration between all applications and manual action or intervention may be required. This can often mean a user needs to carry out extensive copy and paste operations to share the required information between the applications. This would require a system to extract data copied from an external application using a clipboard type feature and to paste it into an enriched application, for example to pre-fill a certain number in a particular text field.
Using a paste functionality for data transfer is not a new concept and many different products exist to do this. For example, it is possible to paste text data from Microsoft Access Databases into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. In another known system, it is possible to import vector graphics in text format for computer aided design programs.
These known systems use paste functionality to parse input text data into a variety of formats, by pasting a graphical representation into their own user interfaces. However, neither system enables a paste function based on a form-based format such as those that may be required in the travel industry.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,192,380 (INTEL Corporation) discloses a method and system for automatically filling in a form in a web page in relationship with a database storing user data. The system comprises a form recognition unit to determine if data input is required for the form; a tag recognition unit to determine which kind of data is required; a matching unit to find and retrieve matching data in the database; and a learning subunit to update the database based on data manually entered by the user.
US 2006/0059247 (IBM Corporation) discloses a method for automatically filling in a form in a web page related to a user text file stored in a local memory. The system comprises a scanning module for scanning the stored text file to identify text tags and a pattern recognition controller for scanning the source code of the web page to identify the text tags and then to retrieve the matching text tags from the stored text file.
The above mentioned patent and application fail to address many of the problems associated with copy and paste functions between different applications as may be encountered in the travel industry, for example.